Sereniti NetTrooper: Protect Yourself and Your Home Network Network Management and Connection Troubleshooting Joseph Moran
The expansive adoption of home networks — both wired and wireless — over the last few years has led to a similar rate of growth in the home network management software category. Well-known applications like SingleClick Systems' HomeNet Manager and Pure Networks' Network Magic are designed to simplify networking in Windows as well as add a few networking features that Microsoft's operating systems fail to provide out of the box.
The newest entrant to the category is the $29.99 NetTrooper from Sereniti, a company previously known for a subscription-based managed home router product (which is no longer sold). Initial impressions point to NetTrooper being a decent first effort with some useful features, but it lacks some of the features and polish of competitive offerings.
Like any product in this category, NetTrooper's first order of business is to map your network to figure out what devices you have in operation. On our motley network, NetTrooper was able to identify — by name — several non-PC devices including two TiVo DVRs and an Xbox 360 game console. That's impressive, because other products in this category we've looked at simply detected devices on their respective IP addresses and left it up to us to figure out what they were and then name and label them accordingly.
NetTrooper's recognition capabilities weren't perfect, however. It misidentified our Maxtor NAS drive as a Linux PC (the Maxtor does use a Linux OS) and it mistook a networked HP multifunction printer for a PC as well. That wouldn't be a big deal, except for the fact that while NetTrooper will let you rename devices, you can't change the device category or display icon in the current release of NetTrooper. As a result, our Maxtor and HP devices were stuck with PC icons, which can be misleading at a quick glance.
You can view some basic information about a network device by placing the cursor on its entry in the network map. A pop-up box will relay things like IP address, operating system, and in the case of wireless devices the SSID and quality of the connection, but if the device is another computer running NetTrooper (Sereniti lets you install it on up to three PCs), you'll also see the system's rating in several safety and security categories (more on this in a moment.)
Connection Troubleshooting
Should your system ever take leave of its network connection, you can try to restore it using NetTrooper's Repair Connection feature. We tried it on wired and wireless systems, on which we simulated failures by releasing the IP address lease and disabling the network adapter within Windows. In both cases, NetTrooper restored a working connection in relatively short order.
NetTrooper goes a bit further than Windows' own repair connection function, because where the latter calls it a day after successfully obtaining a valid IP address for the local network, NetTrooper actually attempts to ping an IP address on the Internet and complete an HTTP request to make sure the connection is up and running end-to-end. If NetTrooper can't solve the problem, it will suggest what course to take (e.g. checking physical connections, restarting hardware, and so on).
Resource Sharing
Simplifying peer networking is a mainstay of the home networking utility genre, and users will definitely find NetTrooper useful in this area. For starters, its file and printer sharing wizards are more streamlined and have a lot fewer steps than the ones you get with standard Windows. And as long as a system is running NetTrooper, you can share its resources easily from any other NetTrooper-equipped system.
Once shared, NetTrooper makes finding and accessing resources less convoluted, too. Folders and printers shared via the utility are automatically published on separate pages of the software, and are grouped together by system, making it easier to find resources by location.
One sharing feature you won't find in NetTrooper is the capability to remotely access files on your systems or publish certain folders (e.g., family photos) to the Web for people to view. It's not an essential feature, but many people do find it useful — and it's a feature that is included in the competing Network Magic.
